Urban Guerrilla Warfare Book

„Urban Guerrilla Warfare" by Anthony James Joes provides a number of examples for urban guerrilla action and describes them briefly within their context but does not go into much detail concerning urban tactics or emerging developments.

Joes deliberately sampled seven examples of guerrillas fighting conventional forces in an urban setting from the 20th century. The selection of examples covering 50 years and several different continents was specifically designed to eliminate regional, cultural or technological peculiarities and thus make it easier to identify general characteristics by comparison. Also Joes clearly understood the importance of the political objectives of guerrillas for their operational design and included this in his descriptions. This in turn presented the challenge to provide the geographical, political, operational and tactical context for each new example in a volume of just 200 pages.

The author met the challenge by presenting a number of very condensed and brief examples, which necessarily only scratch the surface of many important topics, professional readers would be interested in. Be it the actual tactical feasibility of Marighella's urban guerrilla concept, British intelligence operations in Northern Ireland or Chechen tactics against mechanized columns, many interesting concepts are briefly mentioned but not elaborated on. Therefore the professional reader may well be disappointed by the volume as it does not go into the details of urban warfare as such. On the other hand the comparison of the different examples does show, how the general situation and political objectives lead to different tactics. For example although the guerrilla efforts in Saigon as well as Algiers were militarily failures but both actions could be turned into political successes. The former by focusing completely on the initial successes while ignoring the results, the latter by driving the counterinsurgent into the adoption of cruel measures as to alienate the public.

While the general summary of the different actions is good and well researched, the analysis and discussion is much too briefly and thus general observations deriving from it are hardly justifiable from this work alone. The professional reader will thus often wish for more details, whereas the average reader will find it a good overview of examples with ample source material in the notes to get more information. The same concept should have been used for a much more extended volume than this including detailed analysis from the political framework and objectives down into the very tactics and techniques employed.

In summary this is a well-researched but too brief and shallow treatise of the subject and therefore a good introduction to the average reader but a disappointment to professionals looking for insights into urban guerrilla tactics.